This paper proposes an analytical mode decomposition (AMD) and Hilbert transform method for structural nonlinearity quantification and damage detection under earthquake loads. The measured structural response is first decomposed into several intrinsic mode functions (IMF) using the proposed AMD method. Each IMF is an amplitude modulated-frequency modulated signal with narrow frequency bandwidth. Then, the instantaneous frequencies of the decomposed IMF can be defined with Hilbert transform. However, for a nonlinear structure, the defined instantaneous frequencies from the decomposed IMF are not equal to the instantaneous frequencies of the structure itself. The theoretical derivation in this paper indicates that the instantaneous frequency of the decomposed measured response includes a slowly-varying part which represents the instantaneous frequency of the structure and rapidly-varying part for a nonlinear structure subjected to earthquake excitations. To eliminate the rapidly-varying part effects, the instantaneous frequency is integrated over time duration. Then the degree of nonlinearity index, which represents the damage severity of structure, is defined based on the integrated instantaneous frequency in this paper. A one-story hysteretic nonlinear structure with various earthquake excitations are simulated as numerical examples and the degree of nonlinearity index is obtained. Finally, the degree of nonlinearity index is estimated from the experimental data of a seven-story building under four earthquake excitations. The index values for the building subjected to a low intensity earthquake excitation, two medium intensity earthquake excitations, and a large intensity earthquake excitation are calculated as 12.8%, 23.0%, 23.2%, and 39.5%, respectively.

This paper proposes a structural damage identification approach based on the power spectral density transmissibility (PSDT), which is developed to formulate the relationship between two sets of auto-spectral density functions of output responses. The accuracy of response reconstruction with PSDT is investigated and the damage identification in structures is conducted with measured acceleration responses from the damaged state. Numerical studies on a seven-storey plane frame structure are conducted to investigate the performance of the proposed damage identification approach. The initial finite element model of the structure and measured acceleration measurements from the damaged structure are used for the identification with a dynamic response sensitivity-based model updating method. The simulated damages can be identified accurately without and with a 5% noise effect included in the simulated responses. Experimental studies on a steel plane frame structure in the laboratory are performed to further verify the accuracy of response reconstruction with PSDT and validate the proposed damage identification approach. The locations of the introduced damage are detected accurately and the stiffness reductions in the damaged elements are identified close to the true values. The identification results demonstrated the accuracy of response reconstruction as well as the correctness and efficiency of the proposed damage identification approach.

This study proposes a laser based impedance measurement system and impedance based pipe corrosion and bolt-loosening monitoring techniques under temperature variations. For impedance measurement, the laser based impedance measurement system is optimized and adopted in this paper. First, a modulated laser beam is radiated to a photodiode, converting the laser beam into an electric signal. Then, the electric signal is applied to a MFC transducer attached on a target structure for ultrasonic excitation. The corresponding impedance signals are measured, re-converted into a laser beam, and radiated back to the other photodiode located in a data interrogator. The transmitted impedance signals are treated with an outlier analysis using generalized extreme value (GEV) statistics to reliably signal off structural damage. Validation of the proposed technique is carried out to detect corrosion and bolt-loosening in lab-scale carbon steel elbow pipes under varying temperatures. It has been demonstrated that the proposed technique has a potential to be used for structural health monitoring (SHM) of pipe structures.

Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) has been widely used for structural identification and damage detection. However, conventional EKF approaches require that external excitations are measured. Also, in the conventional EKF, unknown structural parameters are included as an augmented vector in forming the extended state vector. Hence the sizes of extended state vector and state equation are quite large, which suffers from not only large computational effort but also convergence problem for the identification of a large number of unknown parameters. Moreover, such approaches are not suitable for intelligent structural damage detection due to the limited computational power and storage capacities of smart sensors. In this paper, a two-stage and two-step algorithm is proposed for the identification of structural damage as well as unknown external excitations. In stage-one, structural state vector and unknown structural parameters are recursively estimated in a two-step Kalman estimator approach. Then, the unknown external excitations are estimated sequentially by least-squares estimation in stage-two. Therefore, the number of unknown variables to be estimated in each step is reduced and the identification of structural system and unknown excitation are conducted sequentially, which simplify the identification problem and reduces computational efforts significantly. Both numerical simulation examples and lab experimental tests are used to validate the proposed algorithm for the identification of structural damage as well as unknown excitations for structural health monitoring.

Recently, a new output-only modal identification method based on time-frequency independent component analysis (ICA) has been developed by the authors and shown to be useful for even highly-damped structures. In many cases, it is of interest to identify the complex modes of structures with non-proportional damping. This study extends the time-frequency ICA based method to a complex ICA formulation for output-only modal identification of non-proportionally-damped structures. The connection is established between complex ICA model and the complex-valued modal expansion with sparse time-frequency representation, thereby blindly separating the measured structural responses into the complex mode matrix and complex-valued modal responses. Numerical simulation on a non-proportionally-damped system, laboratory experiment on a highly-damped three-story frame, and a real-world highly-damped base-isolated structure identification example demonstrate the capability of the time-frequency complex ICA method for identification of structures with complex modes in a straightforward and efficient manner.

The Stonecutters Bridge (SCB) in Hong Kong is the third-longest cable-stayed bridge in the world with a main span stretching 1,018 m between two 298 m high single-leg tapering composite towers. A Wind and Structural Health Monitoring System (WASHMS) is being implemented on SCB by the Highways Department of The Hong Kong SAR Government, and the SCB-WASHMS is composed of more than 1,300 sensors in 15 types. In order to establish a linkage between structural health monitoring and maintenance management, a Structural Health Rating System (SHRS) with relevant rating tools and indices is devised. On the basis of a 3D space frame finite element model (FEM) of SCB and model updating, this paper presents the development of an SHR-oriented 3D multi-scale FEM for the purpose of load-resistance analysis and damage evaluation in structural element level, including modeling, refinement and validation of the multi-scale FEM. The refined 3D structural segments at deck and towers are established in critical segment positions corresponding to maximum cable forces. The components in the critical segment region are modeled as a full 3D FEM and fitted into the 3D space frame FEM. The boundary conditions between beam and shell elements are performed conforming to equivalent stiffness, effective mass and compatibility of deformation. The 3D multi-scale FEM is verified by the in-situ measured dynamic characteristics and static response. A good agreement between the FEM and measurement results indicates that the 3D multi-scale FEM is precise and efficient for WASHMS and SHRS of SCB. In addition, stress distribution and concentration of the critical segments in the 3D multi-scale FEM under temperature loads, static wind loads and equivalent seismic loads are investigated. Stress concentration elements under equivalent seismic loads exist in the anchor zone in steel/concrete beam and the anchor plate edge in steel anchor box of the towers.

This paper proposed a structural time-varying damage detection method by using synchrosqueezing wavelet transform. The instantaneous frequencies of a structure with time-varying damage are first extracted using the synchrosqueezing wavelet transform. Since the proposed synchrosqueezing wavelet transform is invertible, thus each individual component can be reconstructed and the modal participation factor ratio can be extracted based on the amplitude of the analytical signals of the reconstructed individual components. Then, the new time-varying damage index is defined based on the extracted instantaneous frequencies and modal participation factor ratio. Both free and forced vibrations of a classical Duffing nonlinear system and a simply supported beam structure with abrupt and linear time-varying damage are simulated. The proposed synchrosqueezing wavelet transform method can successfully extract the instantaneous frequencies of the damaged structures under free vibration or vibration due to earthquake excitation. The results also show that the defined time-varying damage index can effectively track structural time-varying damage.

Large concrete structures are prone to cracks and damages over time from human usage, weathers, and other environmental attacks such as flood, earthquakes, and hurricanes. The health of the concrete structures should be monitored regularly to ensure safety. A reliable method of real time communications can facilitate more frequent structural health monitoring (SHM) updates from hard to reach positions, enabling crack detections of embedded concrete structures as they occur to avoid catastrophic failures. By implementing an unconventional mode of communication that utilizes guided stress waves traveling along the concrete structure itself, we may be able to free structural health monitoring from costly (re-)installation of communication wires. In stress-wave communications, piezoelectric transducers can act as actuators and sensors to send and receive modulated signals carrying concrete status information. The new generation of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based smart aggregates cause multipath propagation in the homogeneous concrete channel, which presents both an opportunity and a challenge for multiple sensors communication. We propose a time reversal based pulse position modulation (TR-PPM) communication for stress wave communication within the concrete structure to combat multipath channel dispersion. Experimental results demonstrate successful transmission and recovery of TR-PPM using stress waves. Compared with PPM, we can achieve higher data rate and longer link distance via TR-PPM. Furthermore, TR-PPM remains effective under low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. This work also lays the foundation for implementing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) stress wave communication networks in concrete channels.

Instrumentation on structural health monitoring system imposes critical issues for applying the structural monitoring system to real world structures, for which not only on the configuration and geometry, but also aesthetics on the system to be monitored should be considered. To illustrate this point, two real world structural health monitoring systems, the structural health monitoring system of Shenzhen Vanke Center and the structural health monitoring system of Shenzhen Bay Stadium in China, are presented in the paper. The instrumentation on structural health monitoring systems of real world structures is addressed by providing the description of the structure, the purpose of the structural health monitoring system implementation, as well as details of the system integration including the installations on the sensors and acquisition equipment and so on. In addition, an intelligent algorithm on stress identification using measurements from multi-region is presented in the paper. The stress identification method is deployed using the fuzzy pattern recognition and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory, where the measurements of limited strain sensors arranged on structure are the input data of the method. As results, at the critical parts of the structure, the stress distribution evaluated from the measurements has shown close correlation to the numerical simulation results on the steel roof of the Beijing National Aquatics Center in China. The research work in this paper can provide a reference for the design and implementation of both real world structural health monitoring systems and intelligent algorithm to identify stress distribution effectively.

Convergence difficulty and available complete measurement information have been considered as two primary challenges for the identification of large-scale engineering structures. In this paper, a time domain substructural identification approach by combining a weighted adaptive iteration (WAI) algorithm and an extended Kalman filter method with a weighted global iteration (EFK-WGI) algorithm was proposed for simultaneous identification of physical parameters of concerned substructures and unknown external excitations applied on it with limited response measurements. In the proposed approach, according to the location of the unknown dynamic loadings and the partially available structural response measurements, part of structural parameters of the concerned substructure and the unknown loadings were first identified with the WAI approach. The remaining physical parameters of the concerned substructure were then determined by EFK-WGI basing on the previously identified loadings and substructural parameters. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach was demonstrated via a 20-story shear building structure and 23 degrees of freedom (DOFs) planar truss model with unknown external excitation and limited observations. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of satisfactorily identifying both the substructural parameters and unknown loading within limited iterations when both the excitation and dynamic response are partially unknown.

Proper placement of sensors plays a key role in construction and implementation of an effective structural health monitoring (SHM) system. This paper proposes a novel methodology called the distributed monkey algorithm (DMA) for the optimum design of SHM system sensor arrays. Different from the existing algorithms, the dual-structure coding method is adopted for the representation of design variables and the single large population is partitioned into subsets and each subpopulation searches the space in different directions separately, leading to quicker convergence and higher searching capability. After the personal areas of all subpopulations have been finished, the initial optimal solutions in every subpopulation are extracted and reordered into a new subpopulation, and the harmony search algorithm (HSA) is incorporated to find the final optimal solution. A computational case of a high-rise building has been implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Investigations have clearly suggested that the proposed DMA is simple in concept, few in parameters, easy in implementation, and could generate sensor configurations superior to other conventional algorithms both in terms of generating optimal solutions as well as faster convergence.

Compared to ambient vibration testing, impact testing has the merit to extract not only structural modal parameters but also structural flexibility. Therefore, structural deflections under any static load can be predicted from the identified results of the impact test data. In this article, a signal processing procedure for structural flexibility identification is first presented. Especially, practical issues in applying the proposed procedure for structural flexibility identification are investigated, which include sensitivity analyses of three pre-defined parameters required in the data pre-processing stage to investigate how they affect the accuracy of the identified structural flexibility. Finally, multiple-reference impact test data of a three-span reinforced concrete T-beam bridge are simulated by the FE analysis, and they are used as a benchmark structure to investigate the practical issues in the proposed signal processing procedure for structural flexibility identification.

This study develops a two stage procedure to identify the structural damage based on the optimized artificial neural networks. Initially, the modal strain energy index (MSEI) is established to extract the damaged elements and to reduce the computational time. Then the genetic algorithm (GA) and artificial neural networks (ANNs) are combined to detect the damage severity. The input of the network is modal strain energy index and the output is the flexural stiffness of the beam elements. The principal component analysis (PCA) is utilized to reduce the input variants of the neural network. By using the genetic algorithm to optimize the parameters, the ANNs can significantly improve the accuracy and convergence of the damage identification. The influence of noise on damage identification results is also studied. The simulation and experiment on beam structures shows that the adaptive parameter selection neural network can identify the damage location and severity of beam structures with high accuracy.